In the Woods, Still

The young guy was, not being judgy about it, unremarkable. Late teens, maybe early 20s. Slim build. Oval glasses on a straight nose. Tight-cut hair under a camo hat. He was with an older lady. I assume it was his mom. I didn’t ask. Sometimes it’s better not to ask.

The three of us, strangers, were just strolling in the woods — I do that once in a while as a volunteer nature guide — talking about, among other things, Joro spiders and the class on the environment that the young man was taking. He offered a few comments about fishing. I plowed through a cursory history of the land (it’s part of my spiel). We were all complaining about the incessant heat, even there in the depths of the forest, when (as often happens during walks in the woods) I ran face-first into a huge honking spider web.

“Did you just run into a spider web?” screamed a woman on a trail several feet above us. (All the flailing and sputtering, and maybe a trace scent of fear, evidently tipped her off.) She and her walk-mate were laughing, uproariously. Clearly at, not with, me. “That’s what these are for,” she said, as the two swung long, crooked sticks in front of them, looking like a pair of REI Leonard Bernsteins.

I waved at them through the stickiness and was about to move on when the same woman piped up again. “Love your hat,” she said to the young dude. The guy, politely, mumbled back, “Thank you.” It was a quick exchange that probably made his ma — if I had to guess, it was his mom — very proud.

I had not noticed the guy’s hat. So, ignoring the newly un-homed spider who already, I was convinced, was making a crawly trek down my spine, I stole a glance at the kid’s lid for the first time. Yet, even as I heard the words come out of the laughing hiker’s mouth, even as I snuck a peek, I knew what was what. I knew exactly what she saw. I’d been here before.

TRUMP 2024, says the hat.

Sigh, says me.

****

Think, if you would, where we were about six short weeks ago. For at least half this country’s voters (we shall see, eh?), outright dread had set in. Misery was king. Disappointment was its running mate. Then, out of nowhere, came confusion, a dawning recognition of the possibility of change, and in the last week or two, the very real, very welcome blossoming of a previously dead-and-buried emotion: hope.

In late July, Joe Biden (the president … remember him?) was rudely but necessarily pushed aside as his party’s de facto nominee in the 2024 election, convinced by the Democratic power brokers that he didn’t stand a chance of beating Donald Trump this November. Like it or not, those power brokers — the Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, all the old guard that Joe stood beside and often butted heads with over the past several decades — were dead-on right. Joe’s old. He’s looking feebler by the day. Half the country was, indeed, dreading November. People wanted another choice.

Biden, then, was hooked off-stage, and his vice president, Kamala Harris, in a practical political tsunami, was coronated at the Democratic National Convention as the new nominee. She is young, well-spoken, and energetic, all things Joe (bless his heart) has not been for far too long. Those are at least two traits, by the by, that her old, rambling opponent is not.

Now, as they say in the business, we have a whole new ballgame. Polls show it. Trump realizes it. We have gone — at least half of us, eh? — from dread to a halting hope in something less than six weeks. But now comes the really hard part. Now, reality is coming at us all. Hard.

Election Day is in less than 10 weeks. Early voting, here in Georgia, starts October 15. This, as they say in some business or another, suddenly is a race to the wire. And as things always are when Trump is involved — always, every single time — this is about to get down and very, very dirty.

But at least it’s a race.

****

For Democrats, and for the non-Ds who don’t believe four more years of another Trump presidency is particularly palatable (some think that Trump II would be downright disastrous for democracy), the next 10 weeks will be excruciating. If dread has given way to hope, hope now is going arm-in-arm with a severe case of anxiety. It’s like hope with a nasty cold sore. You want to embrace it, but what the hell is that on your lip?

The debates are still to come. That, as we’ve seen, can go either way. Harris’ polls are promising, in varying degrees. But they’re just polls. We’ve seen how those can go wrong, too. Harris’ post-convention high already is waning.

Yet maybe the most anxiety-producing part of this whole upside-down season for Democrats, and those simpatico to Ds, is something that’s been around for more than a decade, something hatched shortly after Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, something that came screaming fully into the American consciousness before the 2016 election.

Trump and Trumpism. The Trump faithful. The MAGA army. All those damn hats. They’re still out there. Even after losing in 2020 — yes, he lost, and by quite a bit, and I could put dozens of legitimate citations here, and I could put dozens more shooting down anyone’s assertion that he won, but believe what you want to believe — Trump has maintained an unwavering core of supporters. And they’re not going away unless Harris sends Trump and Trumpism into retirement. Now.

Nobody, I think, realizes that more than Harris (who, perhaps strangely, has never met Trump). In her first sit-down interview as the Democratic nominee, she was asked, in effect, what she had to offer the country. Her response was telling.

” … what I believe the American people deserve,” she said, “which is a new way forward, and turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies.”

The interviewer, rightfully, called her out on that carefully curated politician’s response, pointing out that she’s been vice president for going on four years. Shouldn’t she have been pushing this “new way forward” already? Shouldn’t she have already turned the page?

But Harris wasn’t talking about a way through the pandemic (which this country has managed better than just about everybody), or an end to pandemic-era inflation (coming down), or a fix to many other problems that the country faces. Many other problems, by the by, that it’s always faced.

“I’m talking about an era that started about a decade ago where there is some suggestion — warped I believe it to be — that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on [who] you beat down instead of where I believe most Americans are, which is to believe that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up,” she said. “That’s what’s at stake as much as any other detail that we could discuss in this election.”

She’s talking about ending the name-calling, cheap-shot hurling, constantly lying, hate-spewing brand of politics popularized by a draft-dodging billionaire who lives in both a New York tower with his name on it and a Florida castle by the sea, a man born into wealth who never served anyone or anything before deciding to run for president — seriously, people serve Donald Trump, he doesn’t serve people — and who somehow has managed to convince millions, back in 2016 and still now, that he is one of them.

Harris is talking about breaking the Trump spell. That, more than selling people on her record on the economy (we were in an economy-wrecking pandemic, for god’s sake, when Biden-Harris came in!) or her foreign policy chops or her views on climate change or anything else, is what Harris has to do.

****

If you know one thing about Trump — everybody knows this; it’s a point of pride among the red-hatters out there — it’s that he’ll do anything to seize power and to hang onto it. No stoop is too low. No cheap shot it too cheap. As it is with his golf game, there is no out of bounds. Here are four quick examples, out of literally thousands, that qualify for Trump’s Mount Rushmore of Sliminess:

  • In 2015, he said rival Republican John McCain, who spent more than five years in a Vietnamese POW camp, was not a war hero … because he was captured. Classy.
  • Back in 2016, he invited four women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual abuse — Bill Clinton, remember, was not even running against Trump, had nothing to do with the race — to sit in on his debate against his real opponent, Hillary Clinton. Nice.

I could go on. And on and on. But we all know. Trump will do anything to win. Illegal, unethical, smarmy … he’s done it all.

Already, in the few weeks since Harris has been the nominee, Trump promoted a tweet (or whatever it’s called on his Truth Social platform) suggesting that she traded sexual favors to get ahead in her career. All class. He’s said, with a straight face, that he’s better-looking than her. Awesome. He’s questioned her Blackness. Just peachy. He has continually, purposely, mispronounced her name. Great. He has called her a liar, which, coming from him … He’s incredible, isn’t he?

None of that, of course, or those thousand other instances that I could cite, will change the mind of the MAGAites, many of whom truly, astonishingly believe that Trump is a godsend. Literally. But that’s really OK. Harris is running for everybody else, for everyone tired of Trump’s childish, mean, tiresome shtick. Harris is aiming to show that the last roughly 10 years of Trump’s me-first, everyone-else-last style of politics — style is probably putting it generously — isn’t the way this country should be.

Things will get a lot darker in these political woods in the next 10 weeks. Expect the worst. Even then, you may be surprised. But for at least half of us — maybe more; some experts suggest roughly 10 percent of each side has yet to make up its mind for 2024 — if we can survive the never-ending torrent of lies, the whining and the finger-pointing and the all-out hatred from Trump and his hatters, if we can just sidle past the soul-smashing negativity and doomsaying, something else, something better for all of us, awaits.

We can hope, can’t we?

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